IBM's 18-Month Company-Wide Email System Migration Has Been a Disaster (theregister.com) 117
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: IBM's planned company-wide email migration has gone off the rails, leaving many employees unable to use email or schedule calendar events. And this has been going on for several days. Current and former IBMers have confirmed to The Register that the migration, 18 months in the making, has been a disaster. We've been told that email service has been intermittent for the past four or five days, and not everyone has been affected in the same way. Lack of access has been shorter for some -- one source told us email was back after two days of downtime. Slack is said to be working though Outlook, Verse (IBM's webmail), and Notes have been unreliable.
"Outlook won't work with the new system, IBM Notes won't work and the online email called Verse has now gone down," a tipster told us. "Everyone has been affected and no fix is in sight." One source we spoke with laid the blame on IBM CFO James Kavanaugh for cutting costs and not hiring the right people. Over the weekend, a source told us, a blog post to IBM's internal network w3 said the migration had been planned for 18 months and that everything should go fine provided everyone follows the instructions emailed to them. Evidently, this did not happen. Since then, a banner has gone up on w3 pointing people to a Slack channel for updates on the situation, and IBM's CIO has posted a note to employees addressing the problems. Presently, the w3 status page returns an error. We're told that the migration plan followed from IBM's decision in 2018 to sell various software products, including Notes, to India-based HCL Technologies. Following the sale, Big Blue didn't want its data on HCL's servers. "They were transitioning to IBM-owned servers," one source told us. "That's where it broke down." There's also concern that "disappeared messages may not be restored," says The Register. "We've even heard that IBM employees have been approached by recruiters posing questions like, 'Why are you still at IBM? They can't even get email straight.'"
"Outlook won't work with the new system, IBM Notes won't work and the online email called Verse has now gone down," a tipster told us. "Everyone has been affected and no fix is in sight." One source we spoke with laid the blame on IBM CFO James Kavanaugh for cutting costs and not hiring the right people. Over the weekend, a source told us, a blog post to IBM's internal network w3 said the migration had been planned for 18 months and that everything should go fine provided everyone follows the instructions emailed to them. Evidently, this did not happen. Since then, a banner has gone up on w3 pointing people to a Slack channel for updates on the situation, and IBM's CIO has posted a note to employees addressing the problems. Presently, the w3 status page returns an error. We're told that the migration plan followed from IBM's decision in 2018 to sell various software products, including Notes, to India-based HCL Technologies. Following the sale, Big Blue didn't want its data on HCL's servers. "They were transitioning to IBM-owned servers," one source told us. "That's where it broke down." There's also concern that "disappeared messages may not be restored," says The Register. "We've even heard that IBM employees have been approached by recruiters posing questions like, 'Why are you still at IBM? They can't even get email straight.'"
Employees? What about customers? (Score:5, Insightful)
For a company built on business solutions, IT infrastructure, and generally being the expensive but safe way of "getting things done", this seems like a costly PR fiasco.
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For a company built on business solutions, IT infrastructure, and generally being the expensive but safe way of "getting things done", this seems like a costly PR fiasco.
Given their obsession with feeding the IBM patent war chest (a.k.a. The Precious), I fail to see how you think they're still in any of that business.
The legal division, is probably their largest expense.
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For a company built on business solutions, IT infrastructure, and generally being the expensive but safe way of "getting things done", this seems like a costly PR fiasco.
Many years ago, IBM was one of the top computer/IT companies. They were also the most expensive, but big companies didn't care. They were willing to pay extra for reliability. IBM was so reliable and solid that it resulted in a saying, "Nobody ever got fired for buying from IBM."
But that hasn't been true for a very long time. At least 20 years. Probably longer. It is no coincidence that IBM employs more people in India than in the U.S. or in any other country.
But IBM is still such a well known brand t
Re:Employees? What about customers? (Score:5, Insightful)
They were never very reliable, there's just a general attitude (not just in IT) that if you pick a known brand name and something goes wrong then it's normal and not your fault, while if you pick a smaller lesser known brand and something goes wrong you'll be the one blamed.
Large brands perpetuate this myth because it makes it much harder for smaller more agile players to enter the market.
Re:Employees? What about customers? (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I can tell, that reputation almost solely stems from the S/360 and extends through to System Z. As far as I have heard that has continued but carries a not-worth-it premium and despite reliability, a lot of software on it is showing it's age in unfortunate ways. While certainly fundamentally capable of running modern applications, a mainframe shop will tend to have 3270 based applications. Even if the applications interact with more modern subsystems, they frequently carry forward limitations like still storing data in US EBCDIC and being incapable of handling characters from other languages.
By the 90s, they were about to self-destruct from a combination of blowing money without strategy, neglecting modernization of their mainframe technology, and an obsession with winning the home desktop despite Microsoft having clearly won the market. One little detail that exemplifies IBM's obsession against Microsoft: ThinkPad keyboards refused to put a Windows key on until Lenovo bought the business and started putting Windows keys down. Gerstner made it into a largely IT services business, which based on my experience was merely mediocre at the best of times, but it did win over businesses. He also scrapped a lot of the technical vitality as expense that wasn't helping their bottom line.
After Gerstner, they were again directionless, but now with a lot of their technical workforce gone to ultimately be merely capable of maintaining and refreshing old product lines without a lot of innovation. IBM research turned out some interesting work still, but the business generally failed to take that work to market in a useful way. The house of cards started falling when Rometty took over. Being at IBM at the time, as far as I could tell she didn't do anything differently than Palmisano (who was mediocre himself), but that was the point when the world stopped blindly trusting IBM again.
But the power of the brand was still potent. After leaving IBM for another company, I basically gave the exact same talks about similar technologies and people went from paying up front for the services/products based on the talk to being skeptical to the point of having to be talked into even embarking on a free evaluation to prove the merit of what I said it would be like. In both cases it was an obscure product with not much reputation on the internet so the entirety of their knowledge was my talk, and virtually the only thing changed in that context was the company name and logo at the presentation level (technically different product, but competing implementation and no way of any potential differences could have factored in yet).
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Disagree, as a linux window manager user, it's great to have a modifier key dedicated to the window manager (Win+Left arrow: tile window left, Win+R: open a run command prompt, Win+FKeys to do different sorts of window scaling task list, etc).
It also hooks to launch the launcher if pressed without another key, but I can't recall hitting it by mistake and the menu popping up is instant and a second tap dismisses it and puts me back where I was.
It's messy that we have three modifers (Ctrl from the teletype da
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Pretty much every platform BUT the PC had a meta key before the PC got the windows key. Apple had command, Commodore had Commodore and then later the Amiga key, Unix systems had meta keys and compose keys. I agree that the placement is unfortunate, though... in most of these cases.
Re:Employees? What about customers? (Score:4, Funny)
this seems like a costly PR fiasco.
This is IBM we're talking about. This latest move will make their home page as one of their great success stories. The new homepage will read:
Customer Testimonials:
IBM - We screwed up our own email migration.
Indiana Government - They sued us and won after we automated their welfare system.
Australian Government - They tried to sue us after we screwed up their payroll but they didn't quite get any money from us.
Phoenix Government - They wanted to sue us but they haven't finished reading the 1700 page contract for the project we screwed up.
New Zealand Government - They sued us.
Indiana Government - They sued us again. This time over outsourcing.
Texas Government - They are warning they'll sue us.
Red Hat - Customers have abandoned us, cloned our distro and re-released it.
Re:Employees? What about customers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Interestingly enough, this is precisely why government procurements strongly favor IBM.
If you are doing a significant regulated procurement and the choices are between IBM's crappy, but potentially workable solution and a better solution from a more reasonable company, your choices are:
-Award the business to IBM and get the project commenced roughly in the timeframe you wanted, albeit with an inferior solution
-Award the business to IBM's competitor, and then have to wait through the protest and/or lawsuit until a couple of years later a judge agrees with your decision and *then* be able to start your project.
Of course if IBM and Oracle are both competing for the project, then it doesn't matter because no matter who is awarded the business, IBM, Oracle, or both will protest anyway so you are going to be screwed for a while no matter what.
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Boomers leaving the workforce are an existential threat because once their customer companies end up under management with an up to date picture of what
Re: Employees? What about customers? (Score:2)
That's assuming customers are using their email system. IBM has a purported reason to run their own email system, to protect their IP. But their customers can just choose Google. And why wouldn't you use Google over this IBM mess?
lol (Score:5, Funny)
i love this so fucking much
I remember about 10 years ago (Score:3)
I was forced to go to a meeting where we were given fliers about "Going Paperless". Reminds me of that, I wish I had kept it.
RHAT will save the day.... (Score:2)
Or not....just put all those emails on the cloudz.
Amazing that a company with an army of top dollar professional technology consultants can find itself in this position. Yet another reason not to rely on what USED to be the safe, but expensive, choice when you were in a bind.
Best,
Email is so naughties (Score:2)
All the kool kids use instant messaging, Slack, Teams, Messenger, whatever. My kids don't even know what email is.
IBM is just moving with the times. The time for an open standards based messaging system is over.
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And IM is a component that's stressing people to no ends and many of them have a questionable behavior too, you can't categorize or archive useful information easily.
Re: Email is so naughties (Score:2)
IM is fine. Slack is a steaming pile of shit.
This could be some strategy to convince holdouts that the company can abandon email. They probably wanted to switch to something like Slack.
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Can something be worse than Teams?
The w3 links are amusing (Score:5, Insightful)
The author of this post realizes that about 95% of Slashdotters have NO access to the w3.ibm.com corporate Intranet page, right?
Hell, the only reason that I know that it exists is because I'm a former IBM employee. The OP didn't really think that one through.
The author doesn't care (Score:4, Funny)
No one will fire them as Slashdot is rudderless and its owners are clearly inept.
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Still better than when Dice was in charge.
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The "Editors" clearly hate their jobs, or they would try harder to be accurate and fix their gross mistakes. And Edit.
Slashdot was the go-to Tech News site but - just like Intel and IBM - now you can only wonder "How did they fuck it up so badly ?".
ask Watson (Score:3, Funny)
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Maybe they could ask Watson.
. . . or the HAL 9000 . . .
HAL: "Well, I don’t think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error."
Re: ask Watson (Score:2)
There's a reason his name is 1 letter off from IBM.
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Hrm. (Score:2)
In the way back days I did some contract work for IBM at Torolab6 and they were using OV/CMS (OfficeVision on CP/CMS).
Dilbert has it covered, of course. (Score:2)
https://dilbert.com/strip/2008... [dilbert.com]
Substitute Email Server Migration for Server Virtualization.
We went from Groupwise to Outlook about this time, and yes it was a mess. It was over with in a couple weeks. The biggest problem was that some people had kept every email since the beginning of company email. My archive was much smaller because I tossed the drivel every month.
Monkeys throwing software at a problem is a great image.
heh (Score:2)
And you lot wonder why iN-ThE-CLoUd is big business. Homegrown email solutions require homegrown staff to maintain.
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Even if you migrate to Office365 (or even start new from there) you still need someone in your org to do the user management bits
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In the cloud is just not your hardware. The software stupidity is still contingent on the user/manager.
Lotus Notes? (Score:4, Funny)
"IBM Notes won't work"
So Lotus Notes still lives !
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Re:Lotus Notes? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I worked for big blue it was in the Tivoli arm just after acquisition. IBM wanted us all to use Notes. It was fucking garbage. I used it only to sign forms and used something else for email, probably something Mozillaish. We also were all supposed to have an OS/2 box in our office just so we could run a screen scraper that handled trouble tickets. But the screen scraper (called ACME, IIRC) was updated by a different team than RETAIN, the mainframe app that actually handled the trouble tickets, so instead I taught myself how to use it using docs I found on the 9 net and then made nice docs for our department so that other people didn't have to figure it out. About a quarter of the staff went to using raw RETAIN via tn3270, turning the OS/2 boxes into Linux boxes that were actually good for something.
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IBM has used Notes since just after the acquisition of Lotus. I was actually working there during the time when they were transitioning e-mail from the system/390 to Notes. Not many people loved Notes, but it was an upgrade IMO.
In 2018, IBM was already the largest Notes user by far... I'm not really sure why anyone would want to buy it without getting IBM as a customer. Selling Notes and then forcing a transition was probably not the best idea. They should have written in the ability to fork it for
The people in charge... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The people in charge... (Score:4, Funny)
The people in charge should have read the book "The Phoenix Project". They might have learned something about one big deliverable.
The people in charge should have just looked at the IBM's history on delivering large projects and instead awarded the contract to someone else.
Re: The people in charge... (Score:2)
IBM just accidentally let their client service model infect their internal operations. Overdue, neverending projects with ever-increasing complexity are great when the customer is paying for hourly professional services. Not as good when your company is footing the bill for internal work.
There's your problem (Score:5, Insightful)
everything should go fine provided everyone follows the instructions emailed to them.
What were they thinking? That people would read, understand, and follow directions? Have they suffered a recent blow to the head?
Notes? (Score:3)
They are still using Lotus Notes? Good Lord I thought that steaming pile of junk was put to rest years ago. No wonder they can't get it to work with Outlook. Migrating the email messages over to Outlook shouldn't be that much of an issue but all the Notes databases will be a nightmare.
This is obviously a huge black eye for IBM. I mean, if they can't get their own house in order who is going to trust them to get THEIR house in order? Yeah...crickets.
Re: Notes? (Score:2)
They do, or did anyway, own Notes. This might also be a surprise, IBM still uses mainframes too.
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if they can't get their own house in order who is going to trust them to get THEIR house in order
Governments. The answer is governments. Even after they sue IBM for failure to meet their contractual obligations they keep going back for more.
Also "Lotus Notes" is not a good description. "IBM Notes" would be. It was after all their own product up until very recently.
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I wouldn't say governments trust them, but governments know that to *not* give IBM business is to get your project tied up in a lawsuit for a couple of years unable to make progress.
Basically, IBM is like the mafia but legal: "Nice project you are trying to get going, shame if it were to somehow get caught up in a court battle for a couple of years..."
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Yes that's true they did rebrand it as 'IBM' when they bought it from Lotus. Back in the late 90s/early 2000s as I recall. A buddy of mine was a Notes developer back at that time. I was just surprised that anyone was still using it :-)
Makes a Phoenix That Burned Up Understandable (Score:2)
G-Suite or whatever they're calling it now (Score:3)
G-Suite (formerly Google Apps, now apparently Google Workspace, I wish they'd stop renaming it) is the right way to go. You're outsourcing your email to Google. It's kind of a no-brainer. Many big (and small) companies do it.
IBM needs to be honest with itself about its capabilities in this arena, as well as the capabilities of others.
Re: G-Suite or whatever they're calling it now (Score:1)
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You're outsourcing your email to Google. It's kind of a no-brainer.
True that. That's what people do if they have no brain...
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We migrated from Google to Microsoft last year. Email is worse (much worse on spam filtering), but many other things are easier. I would have preferred a more neutral email solution, but was happy to migrate from Slack to Teams.
Re:G-Suite or whatever they're calling it now (Score:4, Interesting)
IBM has the competence in-house. Unfortunately, it has so many managers that the competent people don't get assigned to the jobs that require them. Instead they get shuffled around and under/misused. IBM is an exemplary cautionary tale about bad management.
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Good idea to put your corporate secrets on competitor servers.
Just like our IBM SameTime chat migration (Score:5, Interesting)
The time frame and results sound exactly like the migration our organization went through when we were going from the reliable old chat software of Microsoft Lync. We had consultants from HCL on site for months building out the infrastructure which required some enormous amount of servers on the order of 50 times more to deliver the same features and performance. We were told that the cutover is going to happen no matter what and when it did of course the intercompany chat features didn't work even to the point that we could not send text base messages to each other.
It took many more months to get that ironed out. And finally a bunch of special patches to the servers and the clients had to be created just to get basic text chat functionality to work reliably and not crash the client or the servers.
The whole thing was a time and money disaster but it was pushed for by old exIBMers who are here on staff and had a history of always going with big blue no matter what. I could only guess at what kind of backroom deals they were offered and why we kept going with their software.
IBM also would throw in a bunch of free software at our organization which were then forced to be deployed and used even though they were a bunch of turds and many IBM consultants and HCL consultants were brought on board and paid for very generously to get these things running which in the end wouldn't work very well or stably or deliver the solutions that we needed.
The biggest cake that we had was when IBM ran a license check later on on all the free software and solutions that we were offered and then presented us with a multi-million dollar bill for stuff that was told to us was free to use as part of a bundle package.
Luckily as the old ibmers were retiring or left new people were brought on board and the IBM software was ripped out and sunset and decommissioned. After that we started going with modern solutions and now we are better off using a simple client like zoom for all of our chat and video conferencing and meeting solutions and collaboration work. It's cloud-based but at least it works everywhere reliably and consistently with good performance. And also it turned out to be so much cheaper to switch to it than the IBM solutions.
Now anytime we see or hear the words IBM or HCL we know those are really hidden four letter words in our organization and we stay away from those solutions. Even if they have a great price tag or are free as part of a bundle. There's still a few things left in our environment but I don't know how much time they have before they are switched over and are gone.
IBM is now a shell of a company and they are selling themselves off to the Indian based HCL company as faster than possibly can and also transitioning their entire workforce into an Indian based workforce. Our experience with IBM consultants and HCL products has not been very good over the past years. I don't think I would recommend either company for anybody that is serious about functioning products that are affordable that actually solve any solutions for the business.
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Re: Just like our IBM SameTime chat migration (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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The clusterfuck, what you call modern IBM started ca 1995... and has been ongoing until today.
It is amazing how decades of stock dump and pump schemes can bring down such a company!
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It must have taken some real management skill to turn the mighty IBM into what it is today. Holy fuck.
I've Been MBA'ed...
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It does fit the usual cycle though:
1. Become really good at something
2. Become arrogant
3. Become greedy
4. Try to do everything on the cheap
5. Become a has-been that cannot even get simple things right
I guess IBM is in state 5 now.
All recent IBM projects are disasters (Score:3)
In Canada, for like the last 5 years, the federal employees can't have their salary right, because a faulty IBM software, and they don't know how to correct it.
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That's just normal government modus operandi. Why should Canada get their salary if Phoenix government workers can't, if the Queensland Health services can't, if the New Zealand government can't, if Indiana can't. ...
I mean at this point "we fail to roll out payroll software" is one of their crowning achievements across the globe. Right next to "we get sued by most of our customers".
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Good Lord, did all Cobol programmers worldwide retire?
18 months? (Score:3)
Re:18 months? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone who has seen IBM Notes (Lotus Notes) would absolutely think it's crazy that the migration would *only* take 18 months. They clearly rushed it.
Re: 18 months? (Score:2)
I don't think it's at all crazy for any org wide project at a company the size of IBM to be estimated for 18 months.
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Doesn't surprise me (Score:4, Funny)
As a consequence, you can only drive the car with extreme frustration at slow speeds. You even have to hire somebody to help operate the controls. But do you return the car and demand a refund? No, because this must be how all cars work right? And even if you learn of a car that doesn't suffer these issues you spent so much money on this one you don't want to throw that investment away to buy the other one.
Welcome to IBM and the world of Lotus Notes.
Re: Doesn't surprise me (Score:2)
You also just described Jaguar. One of the things that made it a semi-prestigious car in the early days was that you had to have enough money for another car for day-to-day driving while your Jag was in the shop.
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Also if you mention publicly that maybe somethings not quite right with the car, there will be someone coming along to say how wonderful the thing is, but people were using it as a 'car' and it wasn't really designed to be a car, but other than people trying to use it is a car, it's great.
Is it a bug or a feature? (Score:1)
Color me surprised (Score:2)
Trying to run the vulnerability management program, there was a six month fight between the "windows" and active directory teams on who ne
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Palmisano seemed to know exactly when all his chickens were about to come home to roost and managed to shove it all into Rometty's hands at just the right time for things to publicly fall apart, as most employees hand been guessing would happen for a long time. Particularly sneaky of him to announce his '2015 Roadmap' to set a final, impossible goal and then immediately bail to let Rometty take the blame for failing to deliver on his 'visionary' roadmap.
Not that Rometty is a good leader by any means, but sh
IBM Productivity Shoots Through the Roof (Score:2)
Doing Email is not that hard (Score:2)
That is if you firmly stick to essentials, use proven technologies and use engineers with a clue. I think IBM failed on all three here.
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hmm maybe see if they want to throw another consultant into the fire?
More likely, under the bus.
In any case, I imagine someone is re-thinking that old saying that no one gets fired for choosing IBM ... :-)
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that hasn't been true for years, mid and big iron failures a couple weeks after install are common now, they're crap made in Mexico.
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Problems started years ago (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually sympathize with the FP Subject, but AC doesn't deserve the cred.
Perspective (or disclaimer?): The last part of my career (before becoming officially too old to compute) was with IBM. The root of their email problems go back many years. Notes was NOT intended as a primary email system, though the underlying conception was so powerful that it was able to provide email functionality, too. However it became a ship of cruft over the years. While I was still there they were experimenting with a number of alternative email systems that interfaced more or less smoothly with Notes, but the entire thing was becoming like a jenga tower. Not a bit surprised to hear that it finally collapsed. (From reading the story I think I know which development fork they followed, but not sure.)
I guess the funny part is that I was just about the only person in my office who was making any attempts to work with the new email systems. Also tried to encourage other employees to try them out, but the big frustration was trying to get anyone at "the other end" to do anything about the problems I kept stumbling over. I don't think of myself as a particularly innovative thinker, but that's sure how it felt compared to many of my coworkers. (Mostly nice folks and I'm not blaming them, but they were being kept too busy to spend as much time learning new stuff (though I was somehow able to find time for it).) (Unfunny story there?)
(But I still think Huawei has become worse.)
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Basically the ACK, though I wouldn't describe Notes as that bad. I actually felt like Notes had a lot of still untapped powers, but the cruft was too deep to access them.
As Notes had become fossilized, it reminded me of the joke about the kid with the new hammer who sees everything as a nail. Notes may have started as a kind of virtual Swiss army knife, but it had mutated into a kind of hammer and it just wasn't the proper tool for the tasks it was being used for.
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Some bells ringing, but with reservations about "good". My fuzzy recollection is that those systems only felt "good" if you could learn to think in just the "right" way. Exceptions were always getting triggered...
Which reminds me of the joke "The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions." I was pretty clever about learning the rules in those days...
These days? Different rules in play. I remember the most interesting of the new email approaches involved starting from the social network
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IBM's decision in 2018 to sell various software products, including Notes, to India-based HCL Technologies.
I worked at a company that used Lotus Notes. I left the company just after IBM bought Lotus. Thank God. Notes was a steaming pile of shit back then. Now that it has been sold to an Indian company, I can't imagine how fucked it must be.
Fun Fact: It is estimated that 25% of the people in India do not have access to a toilet. That is approximately 400 Million people -- equal to the entire population of the U.S. and Canada combined -- who are literally shitting in the street.
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I worked at a company that used Lotus Notes. I left the company just after IBM bought Lotus. Thank God. Notes was a steaming pile of shit back then.
Ah, Lotus Notes, the memories... was the only software that installed more quickly if somebody kept moving the mouse cursor around over the setup screen.
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No, Symantec WinFax did the same thing. That was the product that taught me to truly loathe anything with the name Symantec on it.
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Awright you just made coffee come out my nose oh winfax i don;t miss you at all.
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(after interminable hold time listening to bad NY saxophone jazz)
"Symantec tech support."
Winfax keeps blue screening our NT4.0 machines.
"Yes, sir. That's a known issue."
Is there a hot fix or service pack to fix that?
"No, just reboot your computer when that happens."
When will it be fixed?
"I don't think anyone is working on that."
How do I make it stop blue screening the computers?
"We find that if you disconnect the modem then it won't do that any more."
How do I make WinFax work without a modem?
"I don't know
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Ah yes, Winfax, the program explicitly designed to punish you for daring to try to use it.
Occasionally it actually worked, which just made it all the more infuriating when it didn't work.
Thanks for the PTSD flashback, though!
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My boss recommended WinFax because he had used the previous version, when Delrina still owned it. Good stable straightforward product which did exactly what you needed it to and nothing else. Then Symantec bought it and the result was a steaming pile of manure.
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Then Symantec bought it and the result was a steaming pile of manure.
Fun Fact: "Symantec" spelled sideways is "steaming pile of manure".
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r.e. your sig - We just celebrated our 33rd anniversary, and I told my wife that in October we should have an LP Party. She didn't get it.
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No Symantec product I ever bought worked properly. Not its anti-virus stuff, not its back-up software, not its disk authoring software nothing. And the manual and support for the (non-working) software was as bad or worse. After four or five tries (I kept hoping) I gave up forever.
Also knew some people who worked there, for awhile. Horrible place to work.
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The days of the Serial and PS2 mouse, where the Mouse was communicating via interrupts. The data gets cached, and sometimes stop when the Cache is full, then when you move your mouse an interrupt happens, that tells the computer, perhaps you push that Cache into storage and get more data.
I have found in the old BBS days if you had a Terminal Emulator that had mouse support, you can sometime speed up download by moving the mouse, common with Xmodem 1k protocol.
Re: doesn't surprise me (Score:2, Informative)
I have literally seen Indians in developed towns shitting in the street.
I don't claim it has anything to do with software quality, or that software engineers were the ones doing this.
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I assume you are referring to developed towns in the US, like SF?
Re: (Score:2)
I meant towns in India.